Through the Woodwork
by Marissalyn
Summary: When Perry organizes a decade dance, Laura asks Carmilla which decade was her favorite. Carmilla in turn then tells Laura about all of the lives she has lived.


"So in addition to the Adonis festival, this year I've decided with a couple of the other floor dons that we were going to move up the annual dance and start organizing it now." Perry said as she stood in the middle of room 307.

"So that was this week's topic in the floor don meeting. I knew I came in during the wrong time." Carmilla teased.

Laura looked up at her girlfriend from where she leaned back against her between her legs. "What were you doing at the floor don meeting?"

"She was stealing the food I had made for it." Perry said with a huff.

Carmilla's eyes shined with undiscovered mirth. Laura knew by this point in their relationship that the vampire had yet to throw the punchline.

"You know I did wait until after the meeting to ransack the room." Carmilla continued.

LaF was smiling lightly from their spot in the desk chair, while the pigment in Perry's face was beginning to match her hair (to be quite honest it looked like she could pop a blood vessel at any moment).

Carmilla grinned, "I waited a whole ten minutes even, to let Raggedy Ann here cool off from her weekly brawl with Diane before I came in to ruffle up her curls, but when I walked in these two were going at it like rabbits."

Laura looked over at Perry who was staring at a stain on the carpet, avoiding eye contact.

LaF spoke up, "We were just making out. It's not like when we walked in on you face first in L."

Laura blushed as Carmilla smirked, wrapping her arms around her tiny girlfriend, pressing a quick kiss to her temple. "You start knocking and so will I."

LaFontaine shrugged, not really bothered by the confrontation.

"I just want to discuss the meeting but I need to go now. It's a decade dance, dress as your favorite one." Perry said before fleeing the room, LaF trailing behind.

Laura shook her head after the door closed. "You didn't have to do that."

Carmilla chuckled, "I'm just teaching them a lesson is all."

"So what's your favorite decade?"

Carmilla raised a brow at the quick change in subject. "I'm not sure, they all had their moments."

Laura burrowed further into the taller girl's arms. "Tell me about them, maybe if you talk about it you'll figure out which one you liked best."

"Alright, but fair warning cupcake, it wasn't always my mother I was running from."

"If you can relive it, I can listen."

Carmilla nodded once before leaning back against the infamous yellow pillow to get comfortable.

XXX

After the complete disaster that was the 70 years in a coffin, Carmilla had finally begun living a life in the 50s.

She had picked up a job at a diner in Minnesota, keeping busy by waiting tables in rollerblades and poodle skirts. Working double shifts to keep herself busy, Carmilla spent the time outside of her job hiding and fearing for her life. Her biggest fear was that her mother knew that she no longer resided beneath the earth.

XXX

In the 1960s Carmilla picked up chain smoking to replace the feeling of her lungs being filled with blood. It was more of a safety net than anything else. She would never tell anyone why she did the things she did in these ten years, she liked to think she forgot about most of them. It mostly hurt to think that she was ever that pathetic. That she had actually surrendered to her mom and followed her back to Silas with her tail between her legs.

Her mother had found her in the spring of '64 just outside of Florence, Italy. Carmilla had saved up all the money from her previous years as a waitress and decided to travel through Italy and France, something her mother would have never allowed her to do alone, after all she was a beautiful diamond, much too fragile to be given the opportunity to be scuffed or chipped.

Carmilla had been sitting in a cafe, her appearance changing with the decade, her poodle skirts gone and her hair longer. She had more of a wild look in her eye, getting rather friendly with many lonely housewives back in the states and widows in Europe. Carmilla liked them younger and more naive, but the older they were the closer she felt to them. She was supposed to be older than them but at least this way she can get an idea of what it would be like to age, for skin to wrinkle and hair to grey. To know what a withering heart sounded like.

Her mother had simply sat down across from her, sipping at a tea cup that had seen better days and a look in her eye that meant business. She gave Carmilla two options, to go back with her to Silas and obey her commands, or be forced back beneath the ground with a stake wedged between her ribs for good.

Carmilla obviously chose the former, even if she may have loathed herself for never aging, she loved life. Not necessarily hers, but the ones around her. Everyone's stories made her eyes flicker with light that hadn't stayed since the day Ell died. Not since she had been promised the world and love, sex and champagne, everything that a young eighteen year old girl could want. Before she had the metaphorical rug ripped out from beneath her and she was trapped in a box filled with her now gone lover's blood, her life source that became her nightmare.

It took Carmilla another fifteen years to not choke on the blood she drank.

XXX

1970s Carmilla was new and improved. She wore her hair shoulder length and shaggy, her bangs more present than ever. Her legs sheathed in flared jeans and her frame draped with flowy tops. She still smoked; it was a necessity at this point, her dead lungs not feeling the effect that a living one's would. Even her mother gave up making her try and quit. If it meant that Carmilla would lure girls in every twenty years for her, than she could puff out as much smoke as she wanted.

Her mother finally gave Carmilla the go ahead to leave Silas for a while, as long as she returned when she called.

Carmilla moved to New York, a large city full of dreams and wonders, a city that at some times felt small and smothering, a city that felt too mature and too juvenile for her. She stayed long enough to attend Woodstock and then planned to travel once more.

XXX

Carmilla returned to Silas in '84 per her mother's request.

Her hair hadn't changed much from the previous decade; it was a bit longer and had more volume to it due to all the Aquanet she used daily. Her wardrobe was full of fishnet and shoulder pads (after all she did have to fit in with the college kids to do her job right).

After her duty was fulfilled as temptress, she moved to Germany where she then traveled all over Sweden and Norway.

XXX

The 90s had been a light at the end of Carmilla's rougher years. She had decided to move to LA, where she soon regretted it due to the warmer weather which she was not a big fan of, but she stuck it out long enough to get a job at Apple.

Chain smoking was still a habit and Carmilla began to ponder quitting. People were starting to find it unattractive and she herself was growing tired of spending so much money a week on the rolls of tobacco.

XXX

The early 2000s most people wanted to forget, but nobody hated it more than Carmilla had. She had been living in Canada at the time. She had quit smoking, occasionally pulling out a spare on the darker nights where she struggled to breathe most.

She had returned back to Silas in '04 to start luring in girls once again when she made a mistake. She slipped up; she had forgotten to treat the girl as nothing other than a sack of flesh for her mother to sacrifice. She had let her go, and in turn her mother forbids her from leaving her sight.

Will was now her mother's favorite, or at least she made it seem that way.

Carmilla was no longer allowed to pick out the girls, or talk to them, or to do anything but fuck them until they couldn't think of anything but her.

Her mother had turned Carmilla into a sex machine.

Carmilla's itinerary consisted of take the girl Willy boy had picked out, seduce her in the only way she knew how (she hadn't considered love since Ell, she thought herself to be a mere mistake and nothing more. Carmilla didn't think she was capable of anything but what she was currently doing, and her mother took that to her advantage), and then once the girls were head over heels for her, she would hand them over to mother.

If Carmilla slipped up again the threat from 1964 would become her reality, no more second chances.

XXX

This is why in 2014, after a freak accident where a pack of werewolves disappeared, the Light grew hungry once more. Ten years earlier than expected and Carmilla was dredged up from where she had been living off campus to room with a Laura Hollis.

She was to seduce her and hand her over, but what no one expected was for Laura Hollis to be, well, Laura Hollis.

She made Carmilla forget her work, she made Carmilla slip up once again and this time her mother had been out for her blood.

XXX

"Do I really have to wear this?" Carmilla asked from behind the bathroom door, a disgruntled tone in her voice.

Laura checked her hair one more time in the mirror, making sure that her headband hadn't slid too far back. "Yes, you promised." She could hear the bathroom door creak open behind her as she turned around and nearly swallowed her tongue.

Carmilla had picked the sixties as her favored decade because it was the only time she had been happy (before her mother found her) after Ell and before Laura. She wore a short dress that was snug around the torso and flowed outwards in the sleeves. It was pink, orange, and purple in a tacky pattern, a matching cloth headband holding her hair up in a poof before flowing down her shoulders. White gogo boots adorned her feet, and somehow Carmilla made it work, even if her eyes screamed murder and hatred for everything that was currently happening, she still looked sexy.

"Pick your jaw up off the ground before you catch flies, cupcake."

Laura blinked, closing her mouth. She herself had picked the fifties, if only so that she could wear a poodle skirt and ascot. "Carm, you look great!"

Carmilla rolled her eyes, stepping around Laura as she moved towards the door; she just wanted to get this night over with. "Yeah well, this was what I used to wear."

Laura grinned, moving over to her girlfriend and kissing her lightly. "Thank you for doing this."

Carmilla smiled, looking down at the tiny human, "You don't look half bad yourself, Hollis."

Laura blushed, tugging on Carmilla's arm and pulling her out the door. "Come on, I don't want to be too late!"

The dark and broody vampire trailed behind her, feeling lighter and happier and brighter than she had in a long time. "You're lucky I love you, creampuff."


End file.
